


There Within

by Avataraccount



Series: Avatar Oneshots [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Azula (Avatar) Redemption, Azula needs therapy, Crazy Azula (Avatar), Gen, Guilt, Hurt/Comfort, Iroh (Avatar) is a Good Uncle, Not really in this one but we're getting there, Sort Of, Trauma, Zuko (Avatar) Needs Therapy, zuko realizing he's fucked up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:14:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27673202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avataraccount/pseuds/Avataraccount
Summary: Zuko doesn’t know how Azula's doctors already seem to understand what their childhoods were like, and how they seem so prepared to house and treat a dangerous firebender. He doesn’t know why they aren’t afraid of him or her, why they even agreed to come here. He doesn’t understand how Uncle even knew who to contact for help, and how he set everything up so quickly.Uncle looks resigned, when he’s asked about it, which makes Zuko nervous.“These were not quickly made arrangements,” he admits. “I spent a great deal of time when I was traveling with the White Lotus looking into how one could best help a war child who had been so indoctrinated and hurt. I wrote to quite a few people, and have been in contact with the doctors treating Azula for some time.”Zuko stares back at Uncle in confusion.“I don’t understand. You knew she would go mad?”Uncle sighs. He puts his tea down on the table between them, and looks Zuko in the eye as he answers.“No, Fire Lord Zuko. These arrangements were not made for her. They were made for you.”*******Couldn't stop thinking about how Iroh must have been planning on having to "deal with" Zuko after the war.
Relationships: Azula & Zuko (Avatar), Iroh & Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Avatar Oneshots [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2023552
Comments: 25
Kudos: 328





	There Within

When she was born, he had cried. He wasn’t even two yet. They had lead him into a room, a room that his memory paints as dark and ominous with uncertainty, but that must have been just a normal room in the medical wing. He hadn’t understood what was going on, hadn’t understood why he hadn’t been allowed to see his mother all day, why no one would tell him where she was or why everyone seemed so anxious when he asked.

“It was a hard birth,” he remembers someone saying, “But the danger has passed.”

When they took him in to see her, he had already been scared. He tried to run towards his mother, tried to climb onto her bed, but had been held back. His mother had smiled at him, tiredly. She had looked sick, and Zuko had been afraid.

Someone had picked him up, and placed him carefully next to his mother, telling him not to try to sit in her lap like he normally did. He hadn’t understood why he shouldn’t, but he listened anyway, because even at that age he had known what happens when you disobey adults.

His mother had been holding a bundle against her chest.

“Zuko,” she’d said, “Say hello to your sister.” And she had placed Azula in his lap.

He knew what a sister was, in theory, but didn’t really understand the significance of the tiny face staring up at him. All he remembers of that moment is that Azula had been crying. She’d been wailing, screaming with such confusion and despair that it had brought tears to his own eyes immediately, and he had started crying as well.

The sound had burrowed its way into his heart and hollowed it from the inside out. It communicated everything and nothing at the same time. She didn’t understand why she was cold, or why everything was so suddenly bright and loud and frightening. She didn’t know who he was or what was going on or if she would be hurt, or why she couldn’t have been left alone, and there was no way he could explain it to her. She didn’t want to be alive, and he had understood that on a childish level that remained unarticulated but was nonetheless viscerally known.

His mother had tried to comfort him, but he couldn’t be calmed. He had cried, overwhelmed with someone else’s terror, until the two of them had been pulled apart, and he had been carried out of the room, sobbing.

******

He forgets this memory, buried under millions of others, until he hears her crying like that again.

Wracked with pain, twitching with electricity, he thinks he’s dying. He’s dying, and there is a noise, too loud and painful to be the ringing in his ears he first assumes it is.

The noise echoes in his hollowed out heart, stuttering weakly from the shocks his sister put inside of him, and he remembers, with an exhausted sadness, that she’d been crying the first time he saw her.

A memory, that’s all he thinks it is, confused and drifting in and out of consciousness. The screams of a teenage Azula sound nothing like the screams of a baby, but he’s too close to death to think properly. The recognition that the sound is of Azula crying comes not from his brain but his soul, and it is not the noise that rings a bell as much as the horrible pain that opens up in his chest at the sound.

Why the memory of his sister crying is the one his brain chooses to play as he dies is something he’s too far gone to question until he isn’t dying anymore, until Katara is hovering above him and the pain is receding, and his mind clears enough for his thoughts to make sense again.

He has to be helped to stand, is shaky on his feet, but he can’t tell if the tremors that rock him are from the shock of the lightning or the shock of what he’s seeing before him now. Because it’s not a memory that’s ringing in his ears, it’s his sister, right now in front of him, weeping and screeching with fury and misery and sounding as lost as the day she was born.

********

He passes out not long after, and the next time he wakes up he’s in a hospital bed. His whole body hurts, and his head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton.

It takes an almost overwhelming amount of effort just to open his eyes, but as soon as he does he’s glad he did.

Uncle is there, asleep in a chair next to his bed, and the wave of relief that hits Zuko takes his breath away.

Uncle is here. Uncle is alive, and he is here.

“Uncle,” he rasps, and instantly uncle is awake, brushing the bangs out of Zuko’s eyes and looking him over with concern.

“Prince Zuko,” he whispers. “It is late. You should rest.”

Pain makes his vision fuzzy and his thoughts fuzzier, and he feels unconsciousness tugging at his gut already.

But he can’t rest…he can’t rest until he knows….

“Uncle. What happened.”

“All is well, Prince Zuko. The avatar defeated the Fire Lord. You are safe.”

“Did anyone…is anyone…”

“You’re friends are well, nephew. No one was killed. Sokka broke his leg, but he will recover.”

Again, relief bleeds from his heart like a bloodstain, so strong that it nearly knocks him out again.

He almost lets it, but there is something else, there is always something else that keeps him from sleep.

Zuko grasps his uncle’s wrist, suddenly frantic.

“Azula,” he mutters, “Uncle, is she-”

“She cannot hurt you anymore, Prince Zuko.”

“She was crying. Uncle, she was crying.”

It is important for uncle to know this, for some reason.

“I know, Zuko. I saw her.”

“She was crying.”

“She is safe, nephew.”

Something that had been twisted up in fear relaxes at these words. He drops his hand from his uncle’s wrist.

“All is well, Prince Zuko. Rest, now.”

Azula always lies, but uncle never does. Uncle is here, so all is well. He rests.

*******

Zuko goes to see her a week after he’s crowned Fire Lord. She tries to kill him, which he expects, but doesn’t use fire bending to do it, which he doesn’t expect. She tries to stab him with a hairpin, which he dodges easily, and then she screams and cries at him for the rest of the visit.

It’s such a pathetic attempt at murder that it just makes him sadder, knowing what his sister was once capable of, knowing why she was that capable and why she isn’t anymore. He wonders if there is any hope for her, and if there ever was.

The hair pin gets confiscated by the doctors who work with her. They are the best, or so he was told. By the time he had woken up after the Agni Kai, Uncle had already had them brought in from around the world.

It was a relief, to be honest, to not have to deal with the logistics of what to do with Azula. He is the Fire Lord now, has to be brave enough to shoulder the world’s responsibilities himself, but in this at least he can be a child, and can turn to his uncle for help.

“Will she ever get better?” he asks his uncle that evening, feeling drained of any hope he had.

Uncle sighs, and looks at him with haunted eyes.

“I do not know, nephew,” he says honestly. “It is kind of you to worry, after all she is done to you.”

“She’s my sister,” Zuko says, like that means something. Uncle looks at him doubtfully. They both learned their lesson about what family really means the hard way.

“She’s 14,” Zuko amends, and it’s a better answer. “I changed. Maybe she can too.”

“Perhaps,” Uncle allows. “Rest assured, Zuko, that she is receiving all the help we can give her.”

******

Uncle is right, Zuko discovers. He asks questions, of course he does. Who are the people working with her, how is she being kept from hurting anyone, what will happen if she gets better, what will happen if she gets worse. There are answers to everything.

When he asks about the doctors’ qualifications, Uncle tells him. They trained at the best universities in the world, have decades of experience working with child soldiers. This description startles him, and he almost wants to argue, wants to explain that Azula isn’t a child, and isn’t a soldier, but she is both of those things whether he had seen it like that or not, so he keeps his mouth shut.

He keeps his mouth shut, but his ears and eyes open, and he notices things. He notices how the doctors are from the earth kingdom, but seem prepared to work with a firebender. He notices how her room in the hospital is built of materials that Azula can’t burn, but looks nothing like the prison cell he had feared seeing her in. He notices how the doctors look at him, too kindly, like he is also mad, and how they speak to him with the same disarming patience that they speak to Azula with.

He notices that they seem to know an uncomfortable amount about his and Azula’s childhoods. He goes to them, after that first visit, fearful that they will see the same monster in her that everyone else sees, not convinced that they’ll do more than blame her unless he can make them _understand._

They listen, when he tries to explain, haltingly, why she is the way she is, what it was like growing up with their father. But they don’t seem surprised, and talk to him like he is the one who doesn’t understand the depth of the problems. Which may be true, but still leaves him with the disquieting feeling that they know things that neither he nor Azula have told them.

It’s not…bad, necessarily. He leaves that meeting feeling somewhat embarrassed for his anxiety, but nonetheless reassured that these people don’t resent her, don’t resent _him,_ that they do understand, maybe more than he does. 

Nonetheless, it’s confusing. He doesn’t know how the doctors already seem to understand what their childhoods were like, and how they seem so prepared to house and treat a dangerous firebender. He doesn’t know why they aren’t afraid of him or her, why they even agreed to come here, to the heart of the nation that has been terrorizing theirs for a hundred years. He doesn’t understand how Uncle even knew who to contact for help, and how he set everything up so quickly.

Uncle looks resigned, when he’s asked about it, which makes Zuko nervous.

“These were not quickly made arrangements,” he admits. He seems to contemplate the tea he’s holding, and Zuko’s fingers tighten anxiously around his own cup.

Uncle continues. “I spent a great deal of time when I was traveling with the White Lotus looking into how one could best help a war child who had been so indoctrinated and hurt. I wrote to quite a few people, and have been in contact with the doctors treating Azula for some time.”

Zuko stares back at Uncle in confusion.

“I don’t understand. You knew she would go mad?”

Uncle sighs. He puts his tea down on the table between them, and looks Zuko in the eye as he answers.

“No, Fire Lord Zuko. These arrangements were not made for her. They were made for you.”

Silence stretches between them, becomes as solid an object as the table they’re sitting at.

Zuko feels his heart clench, and his world flip upside down.

“What?” He asks, and his voice sounds very small to his own ears.

Uncle’s face crumbles.

“Nephew…” He sounds devastated. He reaches out, like he wants to cup Zuko’s stunned face, but seems to second guess himself halfway there. He drops his hand.

“My dear boy,” he says quietly. Full of grief. “Please try to understand. When you went back to your father, I thought I had lost you. That awful man had you in his clutches again, and I…I could not help you. I did not know, until you appeared in my tent, that you had left to train the avatar. I believed you to be still trapped here, with that horrible man, and I didn’t know what he had done to you, how he had manipulated you, and I could not be sure that you would surrender.”

There are tears in Uncle’s eyes, now. Zuko notices this vaguely, but something is wrong inside his head right now and he feels too disconnected to react to that fact.

“The hospital where Azula is now. That was only for if you would not surrender. I had hoped…I had hoped to keep you close to me, in the palace. There were other arrangements…to have the doctors come and work with you here, where I could watch over you. But I didn’t know if that would be possible.”

Zuko’s thoughts feels sluggish, distracted by the alarming fact of his uncle’s clear distress and his own stupid confusion, but slowly he starts to understand.

He hadn’t thought much about what would have happened if he hadn’t changed sides. It’s not exactly a fun game to play, wondering which of his friends would be dead, wondering who else he would have hurt. The shame of how close that theoretical world was to being a reality keeps his mind flinching away from the thought.

But other people had to make plans while he was having a morality crisis. Those fighting the war weren’t waiting for him to switch sides, and had to plan for a future where he didn’t. Up until now, any vague thoughts about a world where he hadn’t changed sides had been draped in the assumption of another genocide, of the fire nation winning the war. But those planning against the fire nation, including Uncle, had done so under the assumption that they would win, with or without Zuko.

Zuko hadn’t thought much about what would have happened if he hadn’t changed sides, but his uncle clearly had, and that’s what he’s talking about now.

Uncle would have been the Fire Lord. And he would have had to…deal with…Zuko.

Oh.

Oh.

The way the doctors treated him, like another patient. The way they already knew about his father, the way they were clearly ready to deal with an aggressive firebender. They hadn’t come for Azula, they had come for him.

“I’m not crazy,” Zuko says weakly.

Uncle makes a face like the words have physically hurt him.

“I know, Zuko.”

“No. I. I’m not crazy. I knew what I was doing, when I betrayed you. Did you think I’d gone crazy?”

“I did not ‘think you’d gone crazy,’ Zuko. I thought you had been manipulated and lied to, and were terribly, terribly confused.”

Confused.

Like uncle had said another idiom that had flown over his head.

Like he’d gotten stumped trying to do a difficult arithmetic problem, and wasn’t sure how to proceed to find the answer.

Like he’d taken a wrong turn walking home, and wasn’t sure which path to follow to find his way back.

Confused.

The truth is, in the moment he betrayed uncle, he had been confused. But he’d been confused his whole life, and it’s only now that he isn’t anymore that he sees how pathetic that was. How clearly the answers had sat in front of him the whole time.

Because he hadn’t been lost on the streets of Ba Sing Se, hadn’t been again too literal when trying to understand the meaning of a phrase.

He’d been confused, for as long as he could remember, about what was right and what was wrong, something that truly good people didn’t have trouble discerning.

Confused. What kind of person is confused about whether chasing down children is wrong? What kind of person is confused about whether they should betray the only person who’s always stood by them?

He’s so ashamed that some days he still can’t look at himself in the mirror.

He’d redeemed himself, somehow. At the last second, and through the forgiveness of those around him, something he will never stop being amazed at and so, so grateful for. He doesn’t know if he deserves it. He had hoped the avatar and his friends would be able to put aside their anger enough to accept the help he was offering, and hoped, later, that uncle would one day be able to look at him without disgust.

He hadn’t expected what he’d received. Hadn’t expected to be offered friendship, and for his uncle to so easily love him, despite everything he’d done. He hadn’t expected to be happy, and still isn’t sure he deserves to be. But forgiveness and love are things he’s allowed himself to accept, because he doesn’t know how to say no to them. He’s been able to rationalize it, to a certain extent, conceptualizing them as wildly disproportionate rewards for doing the bare minimum to be a good person.

This, though. This he can’t rationalize.

“I wasn’t confused,” Zuko says flatly. His voice sounds far away. “I wasn’t an innocent. I was the crown prince of a regime that terrorized the globe, and I enabled that terror in more ways than one. If you hadn’t thought I’d gone mad, you should have planned to have me imprisoned.”

Uncle’s eyes go wide. He looks horrified.

_“Imprisoned?”_ He says incredulously. “Like your _father?”_

He sounds as alarmed and shocked as when Zuko had demanded he shoot him with lightning, as if this is an equally insane thought.

But it _isn’t,_ it isn’t insane, it’s what anyone would have done, what he would have deserved, what he _still_ thinks he deserves, deep down, and something inside of Zuko snaps.

“Imprisoned like _you,”_ he hisses. “Like you were, because of _me.”_

“Zuko,” Uncle says gently, “That was not your fault.”

_“How was it not my fault?”_ Zuko shouts.

He’s getting angry again, is yelling at uncle for no reason, _again,_ he can feel it, and he doesn’t even know _why._

“Of _course_ it was my fault! Of course it was my fucking fault, uncle! I betrayed you! You did _everything_ to help me, and I sold you out at the first opportunity!”

He doesn’t remember standing up, but clearly he had, and as he steps away from the table he nearly trips backwards on the chair he’d knocked over in the process.

“I’m not- a _doctor?_ I wasn’t _sick,_ I was just _bad._ I could have gotten you killed!”

“Even if you had fought against me on the battlefield, nephew, I would never have harmed you. I would have preferred to die.”

Zuko takes another step away at this, as if the words have physically knocked him backwards.

He doesn’t know what to say to this, doesn’t know what to think. The phantom feeling of his father’s lightning bolt in crackles through his veins, and Zuko turns his head away from his uncle, trying to hide whatever horrible expression he knows is gracing his face.

He’s not sure he succeeds, but uncle doesn’t mention it, just lets Zuko stay tense and avoidant for a long minute. 

Just as the quiet starts to become too much to bear, it is broken by his uncle’s tentative voice.

“Nephew,” he says quietly. “Did you truly think I would have had you imprisoned?”

He sounds hurt, which makes Zuko feel guilty, which he doesn’t think is fair.

“I didn’t think you’d be _happy_ about it,” he says sullenly. “But what else could you do with me?”

“Care for you. _Help_ you.”

“I didn’t need help. I needed to be _stopped._ Like fath- like Ozai was stopped.”

“It is not equivalent.”

“Why not?”

“Because you are a child.”

“I’m not.”

“You _are,”_ Uncle says firmly. “I do not say this to insult or belittle you. There is no shame in being a child. You just are.”

Zuko forces himself to look back at Uncle’s face.

His eyes are kind, but unyielding, leaving no room for argument. Zuko feels pinned by his gaze, small and uncertain in the face of Uncle’s conviction.

Uncle sounds like he really believes what he’s saying. It makes Zuko’s own understanding waver.

Zuko swallows, and looks away again. Off balance, he feels his protests die in his throat.

What had Uncle said?

_I spent a great deal of time when I was traveling with the White Lotus looking into how one could best help a war child who had been so indoctrinated and hurt._

He’d been describing Zuko, not Azula, something that he hadn’t even considered until it had been spelled out explicitly because that description was so far from how Zuko sees himself.

Is that what he is? An…indoctrinated war child?

Zuko feels his mind flinch away from the thought as soon as it occurs, too opposite to his own self image to even be considered. It feels almost painful, in a way, to try to see himself that way, feels like someone is squeezing his heart and flipping his world on its head at the same time, and the sensation makes him sick to his stomach.

_I’m not a child. Not a victim._

He puts the idea away almost immediately, locking it in a box somewhere inside his head, knowing his own mind well enough to know he’s not going to be able to accept that description as true.

Uncle thinks it’s true, though. That much is clear.

Even if he’d fought with the fire nation to the end, he wouldn’t be in prison, like (or, Agni forbid, _with)_ his father. He’d be in the hospital. Getting treated. Because Uncle thought he had been…sick? 

_Confused,_ Uncle had said. Whatever that means. It doesn’t mean crazy, apparently, but he doesn’t know what else a hospital like the one Azula is in is fit to treat, doesn’t know what else you call a sickness that resides in the head.

He doesn’t understand how one can be “not crazy” and still be forgiven for what he’s done, much less what he _could_ have done.

Then again, does he really have to?

He looks back at Uncle, who is waiting for Zuko, calm and patient as always. Waiting for Zuko to process, to understand, to shout and stomp and rage if he needs to. Waiting for Zuko to grow up. Giving him all the time and space he needs.

He doesn’t know how to handle it. He doesn’t know how to handle the patience, the forgiveness, the casual admission that there is nothing, _nothing_ he could do to make his uncle give up on him. That the mistakes he is so deeply ashamed of and so shocked and grateful to be forgiven for don’t even come close to the limit of his uncle’s tolerance. That that limit doesn’t seem to exist at all, when it comes to Zuko.

For all that he’d hated himself for what he’d done to others, what he’d done to uncle, Uncle had never seen the cruelty he’d seen in himself.

Uncle had never seen the villain he’d seen himself as, but only an abused and manipulated child.

Zuko feels tears prick at his eyes, overwhelmed with the understanding of how much he is loved.

All in a rush, he suddenly speaks.

“I’m not gonna give up on her,” he says defiantly.

If Uncle is surprised by the change of topic, he doesn’t show it. He smiles gently, and his eyes crinkle at the corner.

“I never thought you would.”

“She can get better if someone believes she can.”

“I know.”

Zuko pauses, and nods.

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I know you know. I know you know.”

Absentmindedly, he brings his hand to his face to trace the ridges of his scar. It’s been healed for years.

_I know you know,_ he thinks. _And now because of you I know it too._


End file.
